I certainly see what you’re saying, and I may in fact try to phrase myself differently next time in order to prevent this sort of situation from happening again, but the problem here isn’t his insight or how I valued it. It’s the common tendency to overvalue evolutionary psychology itself and misunderstand its epistemological limitations.
I try to gather as many of those sorts of insights as possible and organize them into a system, and I do so simply because of how useful of a hypothesis generator it is, and not because I believe them directly. I read his comment, and I incorporated it into my thinking, but I didn’t do so as a standalone belief (because that would be a misunderstanding of the epistemological status of that sort of insight).
I don’t know. I’m certainly not explaining this very well, and that’s because I’m leaving out an absolute ton of information because I don’t want to turn this comment into a lengthy exposition of the epistemology of this sort of reasoning, but hopefully at least you see enough of what I mean to get my basic point here.
Let me sum this up. I don’t think there’s absolutely anything wrong with his comment, nor do I think there’s anything wrong with how highly I valued it (as a highly insightful point on a random esoteric topic), but I certainly see how conversations like this may be epistemically hazardous to those who take evolutionary reasoning far too seriously, or rather to those who don’t understand the epistemology.
But this seems like a difficult problem when people are posting on such a large public forum. Inferential distance is always a factor, and one that changes depending on who you’re talking to, and it would certainly be impractical to expect every comment to close the entire inferential distance for everybody who may read it, or even for the majority if it’s a thorny or difficult subject.
Sometimes inferential distance gaps are more dangerous than others, and perhaps this is a case you identified as being especially epistemically hazardous, but then I guess your course of action should have been to make a comment in an attempt to close that inferential distance, put the comment in its proper place, and make it explicit what it’s limitations are.
You could have said something like, “This is an interesting insight as far as it goes, but keep in mind X.” Where X is what I’ve just been talking about—the epistemological limitations of that sort of reasoning. That is if you even agree this much. Maybe you just think the comment is useless, and you don’t even agree with what I’m saying about the inferential distance problem or whatever. I don’t know.
In any case though, there was no reason to indict me specifically, and do so with such presumption. If you thought there was something wrong with my comment, you should have just engaged me about it, and done so charitably and thoughtfully.
I do think the comment is useless, but simple qualifiers indicating the hypothetical nature of its statement would’ve made it less hazardous. I agree that attacking you was incorrect, for reasons that I failed to pay attention to due to lack in skill of emulating empathy. I didn’t even think of the comment as primarily addressing you, that was a secondary motivation, so you see how poorly I understood its effect.
The skill for estimating others’ emotional responses to various stimuli that compensates for the flaws of my own native circuitry responsible for the task. How would you call that?
The charitable way of reading that term is to treat “emulating” as a modifier of “empathy”, as in empathy implemented through emulation of the other. I’m inclined to think this is also the intended meaning, if only because the non-charitable sense would be better expressed as “simulated empathy”.
I see. Seems like this discussion has run its course (unless you have more to say). See you elsewhere on the forum, and hopefully this exchange will have no bad social effects.
I certainly see what you’re saying, and I may in fact try to phrase myself differently next time in order to prevent this sort of situation from happening again, but the problem here isn’t his insight or how I valued it. It’s the common tendency to overvalue evolutionary psychology itself and misunderstand its epistemological limitations.
I try to gather as many of those sorts of insights as possible and organize them into a system, and I do so simply because of how useful of a hypothesis generator it is, and not because I believe them directly. I read his comment, and I incorporated it into my thinking, but I didn’t do so as a standalone belief (because that would be a misunderstanding of the epistemological status of that sort of insight).
I don’t know. I’m certainly not explaining this very well, and that’s because I’m leaving out an absolute ton of information because I don’t want to turn this comment into a lengthy exposition of the epistemology of this sort of reasoning, but hopefully at least you see enough of what I mean to get my basic point here.
Let me sum this up. I don’t think there’s absolutely anything wrong with his comment, nor do I think there’s anything wrong with how highly I valued it (as a highly insightful point on a random esoteric topic), but I certainly see how conversations like this may be epistemically hazardous to those who take evolutionary reasoning far too seriously, or rather to those who don’t understand the epistemology.
But this seems like a difficult problem when people are posting on such a large public forum. Inferential distance is always a factor, and one that changes depending on who you’re talking to, and it would certainly be impractical to expect every comment to close the entire inferential distance for everybody who may read it, or even for the majority if it’s a thorny or difficult subject.
Sometimes inferential distance gaps are more dangerous than others, and perhaps this is a case you identified as being especially epistemically hazardous, but then I guess your course of action should have been to make a comment in an attempt to close that inferential distance, put the comment in its proper place, and make it explicit what it’s limitations are.
You could have said something like, “This is an interesting insight as far as it goes, but keep in mind X.” Where X is what I’ve just been talking about—the epistemological limitations of that sort of reasoning. That is if you even agree this much. Maybe you just think the comment is useless, and you don’t even agree with what I’m saying about the inferential distance problem or whatever. I don’t know.
In any case though, there was no reason to indict me specifically, and do so with such presumption. If you thought there was something wrong with my comment, you should have just engaged me about it, and done so charitably and thoughtfully.
I do think the comment is useless, but simple qualifiers indicating the hypothetical nature of its statement would’ve made it less hazardous. I agree that attacking you was incorrect, for reasons that I failed to pay attention to due to lack in skill of emulating empathy. I didn’t even think of the comment as primarily addressing you, that was a secondary motivation, so you see how poorly I understood its effect.
“emulating empathy?” What?
The skill for estimating others’ emotional responses to various stimuli that compensates for the flaws of my own native circuitry responsible for the task. How would you call that?
The charitable way of reading that term is to treat “emulating” as a modifier of “empathy”, as in empathy implemented through emulation of the other. I’m inclined to think this is also the intended meaning, if only because the non-charitable sense would be better expressed as “simulated empathy”.
I see. Seems like this discussion has run its course (unless you have more to say). See you elsewhere on the forum, and hopefully this exchange will have no bad social effects.
Bad social effects teach us valuable lessons.